PDB or Program DataBase is a central component of the Windows ecosystem. Whether you write code in C++ or .NET, without a PDB file even basic tasks such as stepping through code becomes impossible. And yet, the PDB format is largely a black box. At least until now.

Microsoft debuted improved Edit and Continue (EnC) support for C++ projects with VS2015 launch. The first update to VS2015 brings several improvements to EnC users. Windows Store apps and DirectX applications can now use EnC. And all C++ EnC users will find bug fixes and usability tweaks.

Microsoft's new partnership with Xoreax has produced a "freemium" version of IncrediBuild for Visual Studio users. This tool uses several techniques to dramatically reduce project build times for several different project types.

As announced at CppCon, Bjarne Stroustrup and Herb Sutter have started working on a set of guidelines for modern C++. The goal of this effort is improving how developers use the language and help ensuring they write code that is type safe, has no resource leaks, and is as much as possible free of programming logic errors.

Microsoft has released tools to enable Objective-C development on Windows which are intended to facilitate the porting of iOS apps to Windows. This move is not without some controversy, as some developers are upset at how their code was included in this project.

The Edit and Continue debugging feature for C++ code has been available in Visual Studio before in various forms. In Visual Studio 2015 this support has been expanded to include both 32-bit and 64-bit code while maintaining the use of the other debugging tools Visual Studio offers.

Coming only six months after the release of Qt 5.4, Qt 5.5 fixes almost 1500 reported bugs and adds new features, while also ensuring that it will be ready for Windows 10 on time, improving Linux compatibility and OS X parity.

C++ Developers will benefit from the involvement of hundreds of fellow users who reported numerous bugs with the C++ compiler during its release stage. Microsoft has provided a list of all of the bugs that have been corrected for the upcoming release of VS2015RTM.

The Visual Studio 2015 team has finalized its implementation of the various C++ 11/14/17 standards that it will support in VS2015RTM. Accompanying these C++ features will be the completion of C99 language support. All of these will be part of production release of VS2015, which is coming in July.

One of the most recent Facebook's apps, Moments, is using C++ to share its business logic across iOS and Android, Facebook's engineers Ashwin Bharambe, Zack Gomez, Will Ruben explain. Here we review Facebook engineers rationale for that choice and its outcomes.

Most developers don’t know much about C2, but it is a vital part of the Windows development lifecycle. It acts as the backend compiler for Visual C++, .NET natively compiled code, compiled T-SQL, and Objective-C on Windows.

Bjarne Stroustrup, designer and original implementor of C++, has recently circulated a draft aimed at “stimulating a discussion” about C++17 design goals and possible new features,. such as modules, concepts, and ranges. InfoQ has taken the opportunity to talk with Stroustrup to clarify his view on C++ and the committee’s work.

A Developer’s Perspective.Developers have long been constrained by the security capabilities that major platform providers have exposed for application development. How Bromium and wolfSSL employ Intel® SGX to create more secure, next-generation solutions.